Google Inc (GOOG) Posts Privacy Violation Penalty Notice on its Website in France

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Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) posted the notice regarding order imposed by the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) against it for violating the national data privacy regulations in the country.

Last January, the CNIL found that the search engine giant’s confidentiality rules it implemented since March 2012 failed to comply with some of the provisions of the country’s “Informatique et Libertés” law and the European legal framework on data privacy.

Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) was ordered to pay a penalty of €150,000 and compelled Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) to post a statement regarding its violation and a link to the decision on its website in France for 48 hours. The search engine giant filed a petition to court in France requesting the suspension of the decision of the CNIL. Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) argued that posting the data privacy policy violation notice will cause “irreparable damage” to its reputation. The court maintained the decision of the CNIL and ordered to follow it.

Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) combined into a single policy all all of its privacy policies for sixty services including YouTube, Gmail, Google Drives, Google Maps, among others in 2012, which affected majority of its users in the country.

The CNIL indicated said search engine giant failed to properly inform its users in France regarding the conditions and purposes of collecting processing their personal data.

The French regulators emphasized that Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) failed to obtain proper consent from users before using cookies on their website to collect and process their personal information. The search engine giant also failed to set retention periods for all the data.

According to CNIL, the Dutch and Spanish data privacy protection authorities previously issued similar findings regarding the privacy policy of Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG). The French regulator imposed the highest penalty against the search engine giant because of the scale and severity of its violation.

Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) recently reached an agreement with the European Commission (EC) to settle the antitrust complaint filed against it y its rivals in the technology industry. According to EC Commissioner Joaquin Almunia, the latest concessions of the search engine giant addressed its concerns regarding competition. The company guaranteed the comparable presentation of its services and the services of its rivals on its search page.

Almunia said, “Google has finally accepted to guarantee that whenever it promotes its own specialized search services on its page, the services of rivals will also be displayed in a comparable way.”